The Burning Stone

But she was comfortable here lying on straw and surrounded by good plank walls. Horses stamped in the stalls below them; their scent and warmth drifted up, and one by one her comrades drifted off to sleep. She slept, and she dreamed.



She is lost, battering her way through a tangle of high growth that scratches her hands and slaps her face. Swordlike leaves taper to points swaying far above her reach, a forest of grass. The sky is turgid with clouds. A strange humming tickles the air, a whistle with more weight than breath in its tone. She stumbles over a hump, trips, and lands with her hands buried in the oozing, stinking innards of a huge silver-furred bear that, eviscerated and hacked into parts, sprawls in death along the ground.



Just then, a heavy shadow overtakes her. She feels the wind of talons swiping at her back and hears a shrill trumpet of disappointment. Wings beat like bellows above her. She bolts, terrified, and flails through the grass, hands weeping blood and effluvia, but the wind of its passage returns, hot and staggering. She cannot see it precisely, she is too afraid to look up, but it is some monstrous creature, and as she cries out, the talons settle on her shoulders, grip her, and in the next instant her feet no longer touch the earth.



She kicks helplessly as they go up and up and the ground drops away so quickly that her head spins, and it is all she can do to clutch her spear tight. She isn’t imprisoned by bird’s talons at all, but by something more like lion’s claws, and yet she glimpses a noble and terrifying eagle’s head far above, with tufts for ears and armed with a fearsome beak. Beyond massive hind legs poised below her lashes a golden tail. At the heart of the blinding sheen of iron-gray feathers where she might plunge in her spearpoint, she sees a single pale spot on its breast, but they have made height so fast that she fears if she kills it, and it drops her, she will be dead from the fall.



If it is only a dream, will her death matter?



She doesn’t want to find out.



They fly until her shoulders ache. Unlike its claws, time has no grip. A day passes, an hour, a minute; she can’t be sure. The landscape changes as she hangs above it. Perhaps she isn’t moving at all, perhaps it is the land beneath her that moves while she hangs unmoving, Liath used to talk about such things—The heavens are always turning around us, swifter than any mill wheel, as deep under this earth as above it, quite round and solid and painted with stars—but she never understood them or perhaps it is more correct that she didn’t understand why they were worth wondering about. Yet in the last two years she has seen a lot of things that have made her wonder and made her head ache for wondering. The clouds have fallen back behind them, scattering like sheep until at intervals the sun glares down so that she has to blink wildly as her eyes adjust to its harsh light. The bear’s blood dries stickily on her hands, a pair of unpleasant gloves. Trembling, looking at her bloody hands, she realizes that the bear had no claws.



Ahead, grass dies away into hillocks of sand and fields of rock, boulders tumbled into odd, veined shapes by some ancient cataclysm. Ahead, the ground gleams all silver and gold. The creature descends until she sees that the plain opening before her is a desert strewn with sands that resemble seas of golden granules interwoven with channels of silver dust. The sun sets, bathing the glimmering sands in rose light. Abruptly, darkness comes but for a single light, a campfire. She sees no moon.



That suddenly, they dip, and the claws release her. The creature screams, and she is deafened, she falls with her hands clapped to her ears and her spear lost, and she hits the ground. Her knees drive into her chest and she can’t breathe, clutching at anything, finding her spear jammed up against one elbow. The coarse sand burns on her skin, still hot after hours baking in the sun. The grains are oddly shaped, unlike any sand she’s ever seen before: they’re disk-shaped, flat and round like a baby’s petrified fingernail. What ocean deposited this sand here? Where is the shore?



Firelight illuminates a figure walking toward her, but she knows that form as she knows her own heart, always, for her, an easy depth to fathom.



“I called you,” says the princess, giving her a hand and helping her rise.



“What was that creature?” Hanna demands as she brushes off the knees of her trousers. In an odd way, she has become used to these meetings.



“That was a griffin,” says the princess, emphasizing the word as though she thinks Hanna won’t understand it even though every word they speak, two who share no common language, is completely intelligible in her dreams.



“Do you control it?” she asks, feeling faint.



“Nay, I only asked for its help. Just as I ask for your help.” Hanna sees her clearly now with firelight and starlight and the princess’ own shroud of magelight to guide her. Four huge bear claws hang heavily from a leather thong around her neck. Several miniature pouches hang from a belt at her waist, each one cleverly tied closed with thread as fine as spider’s silk. Her felt conical hat is missing, and she wears no covering at all on her head; her braids have been tied back behind her neck to keep them out of the way. She has a healing cut across the knuckles of one hand, and her leather coat has a huge rent in it, as though it was recently slashed and mended. Meat is cooking, and fat is boiling. Her nose is smudged with soot.